Margaret Truman Daniel, the president’s daughter who achieved renown in her own right as a concert singer, radio and television host, and author of best-selling biographies and mysteries, died on Tuesday in Chicago. She was 83 and had lived until recently on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Her death was announced by her oldest son, Clifton Truman Daniel. Mrs. Daniel died after a brief illness in an assisted living center, where she had been on a respirator, according to the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum in Independence, Mo. A library spokeswoman said Mrs. Daniel had been preparing to move from her Park Avenue home to Chicago to live near Mr. Daniel.

Most Americans first knew Margaret Truman as the young woman with blue-green eyes, ash-blond hair and dimpled cheeks who was the only child of the somewhat obscure vice president from Missouri who had ascended to the presidency on the sudden death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on April 12, 1945, as World War II neared its end.

Before long, they were following her career as the aspiring singer whose doting father sprang to her defense with a memorably scorching letter to a Washington music critic who had had the temerity to belittle her talent.

As the decades passed, Americans by the hundreds of thousands knew Mrs. Daniel, too, as Margaret Truman, the author of 32 books, including biographies of both her parents and 23 mystery novels in her popular “Capital Crime Series,” all set in and around Washington.

The confrontation that in retrospect became the climax of Mrs. Daniel’s singing career took place in December 1950. She had been singing professionally since March 16, 1947, when she made her debut as a coloratura with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a radio broadcast that drew an audience estimated at 15 million and, afterward, mixed reviews from the critics.

Later that year, in her first appearance on a concert stage, she sang before a huge audience — estimates range from 15,000 to 20,000 people — at the Hollywood Bowl, accompanied by the 90-piece Hollywood Bowl Symphony, led by her favorite conductor, Eugene Ormandy. In the next few years she sang in more than 30 cities, appeared at Carnegie Hall and signed an exclusive contract with RCA Victor Red Seal Records.

‘You’ll Need a New Nose’

And so she came to Constitution Hall in Washington.

“Because of my father, I was more easily able to obtain important engagements,” she wrote in her book “Letters From Father: The Truman Family’s Personal Correspondence” (Arbor House. 1981). “But I also received more attention by first-string critics and more demanding audiences, who felt that because my father was the president, I had to be not better than average, but better than the best in order to justify my appearing on the stage.”

Mrs. Daniel thought her performance at Constitution Hall to be one of her better ones. But Paul Hume, the music critic of The Washington Post, while praising her personality, wrote that “she cannot sing very well.”

“She is flat a good deal of the time,” Mr. Hume added, concluding that she had no “professional finish.”

Incensed, President Truman dispatched a combative note to Mr. Hume, who released it to the press.

“I have just read your lousy review,” it said in part, adding: “Some day Ihope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot ofbeefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

In the ensuing uproar, reporters pressed Mrs. Daniel for her reaction to her father’s letter. “I’m glad to see that chivalry is not dead,” she told them.

In a revealing biography, “Harry S. Truman” (William Morrow, 1973), Mrs. Daniel wrote: “Dad discussed the letter with his aides and was annoyed to find that they all thought it was a mistake. They felt that it damaged his image as president and would only add to his political difficulties. ‘Wait till the mail comes in,’ Dad said. ‘I’ll make you a bet that 80 percent of it is on my side of the argument.’

“A week later, after a staff meeting, Dad ordered everybody to follow him, and they marched to the mail room,” Mrs. Daniel continued. “The clerks had stacked up thousands of ‘Hume’ letters received in piles and made up a chart showing the percentages for and against the president. Slightly over 80 percent favored Dad’s defense of me. Most of the letter writers were mothers who said they understood exactly how Dad felt and would have expected their husbands to defend their daughters the same way.

“ ‘The trouble with you guys is,’ Dad said to the staff as he strode back to work, ‘you just don’t understand human nature.’ ”

Mrs. Daniel adored her father. She inherited his candor, directness and wit, and she credited him with prophesying her literary career. “You write interestingly,” he wrote to her in 1946, adding that perhaps in time “you can be a great storywriter.”

Her biography of her father, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, fulfilled an expectation she had raised in her first book, the autobiography “Souvenir: Margaret Truman’s Own Story” (McGraw-Hill, 1956).

“I have no thought of writing history,” she wrote in “Souvenir.” “The best I could hope to write would be a footnote to history. As the only child of the president of a great world power at a cataclysmic time, I will certainly be expected to make some comment on this man who will belong to history — to evoke him in special ways, available only to a daughter.”

Mr. Truman, who left office in 1953, died at 88 on Dec. 26, 1972.

Mrs. Daniel memorialized her mother, who died in 1982, in her 1986 biography, “Bess W. Truman” (Macmillan). In it, Mrs. Daniel recounted how her mother had struggled to adjust to life in the White House after Roosevelt’s death, feeling “a smoldering anger that was tantamount to emotional separation.”

Among Mrs. Daniel’s other nonfiction works were “White House Pets” (McKay, 1969), “Women of Courage” (Morrow, 1976), “First Ladies: An Intimate Group Portrait of White House Wives” (Random House, 1995) and “The President’s House: 1800 to the Present” (Ballantine, 2004).

Murders Most Foul

Mrs. Daniel’s foray into mysteries was an outgrowth of her years as a devotee of the genre. “I had been working on a nonfiction book — a history of White House children — but lost interest in it,” she said in an interview in the 1990s. “I was with my agent one day, and I told him I had an idea for a mystery: ‘Murder in the White House.’ I don’t know where those words came from.”

“Murder in the White House,” about a corrupt secretary of state found strangled in the family quarters of the executive mansion, was published by Arbor House in 1980. The novel climbed onto the best-seller lists, was sold to the movies, became a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection and was bought for $215,000 by Fawcett for paperback publication.

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Other books in the series, issued at a rate of one a year, carry titles like “Murder on Capitol Hill,” “Murder in the Supreme Court,” “Murder at the Kennedy Center,” “Murder at the Smithsonian,” “Murder at the National Cathedral” and “Murder at the Watergate.”

“My mother seems to have a strong opinion, often bad, of almost everyone in Washington,” Clifton Truman Daniel wrote in his 1995 memoir, “Growing Up With My Grandfather.” “That’s why she writes those murder mysteries: so she can kill them all off, one at a time.”

Margaret Truman was born in Independence on Feb. 17, 1924, to the former Bess Wallace and Harry S. Truman, who was a county judge at the time. In “Souvenir,” written with Margaret Cousins, Mrs. Daniel said, “I was christened Mary Margaret Truman, after my Aunt Mary Jane Truman and Margaret for Grandmother Wallace.” Her father usually called her Marg (with a hard “g”) or Margie (also with a hard “g”).

After Mr. Truman was elected to the Senate in 1934, the family spent half the year in Independence, where Margaret attended public school, and the rest of the year in Washington, where she was a student at Gunston Hall, a boarding school for girls. She won honors in Spanish and English and appeared in the school’s Shakespeare productions.

Margaret Truman was not fond of the White House, which she sometimes called the Great White Jail. “You never feel at home in the White House,” she said in the interview. “Not if you have any sense.”

Her bedroom was on the second floor, overlooking Lafayette Park. One night, on a dare, she slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, which is said to be haunted by the ghost of the 16th president. Meanwhile, her father went in search of a tall White House butler, planning to have him don a top hat and knock at the door in the middle of the night.

Young Margaret had been drawn to music by a piano-playing father, and she took voice and piano lessons with his encouragement. On her 8th birthday, instead of the electric train she longed for, she was given a baby grand piano.

As she grew older, she intensified her voice training, and when she graduated from secondary school, she was eager to pursue a career in music. But her father insisted on college. She enrolled at George Washington University and graduated in 1946 with a bachelor of arts degree.

No sooner had she graduated than she set out for New York to advance her singing career, taking a leave from it only to campaign for her father in 1948 in his successful race as an underdog against the Republican candidate, Thomas E. Dewey of New York.

In 1951, she embarked on a semi-official European tour, mapped by the State Department.

A Churchill Painting

Overseas, she spoke to King Baudouin in Brussels and danced with Prince Bernhard in The Hague; she dined at Buckingham Palace; she visited the Churchills at their country home, Chartwell; and she accomplished the rare feat of inducing Winston Churchill, a respected amateur artist, to surrender one of his paintings to her.

“At the end of our lunch, Mr. Churchill announced that he had a painting which he wanted me to take back to Mother and Dad, as a present,” Mrs. Daniel wrote in “Harry S. Truman.” “ ‘I’ll be glad to,’ I said, ‘if you put my name on it so that eventually it will be mine.’ ” Churchill harrumphed, she wrote, but complied. The painting, “Marrakech,” depicts one of the gates of that Moroccan city against the backdrop of the Atlas Mountains.

Mrs. Daniel sold the painting last month at Sotheby’s in London for $955,459.

Margaret Truman met Clifton Daniel at the home of friends in New York in the fall of 1955. When she returned to Independence for Christmas and New Year’s, she was besieged by telegrams from him. “I had made the mistake of going out to Independence without giving Clifton my phone number, and it was, of course, unlisted and unavailable, even to one of the top editors of The New York Times,” she wrote.

She and Mr. Daniel, then an assistant to the foreign news editor, were married on April 21, 1956, in Trinity Protestant Episcopal Church in Independence, the same church where Mrs. and Mrs. Truman were married on June 28, 1919.

The Daniels lived on the Upper East Side and for some 20 years spent at least part of the summer in Point o’ Woods on Fire Island. When Mr. Truman visited the couple in Manhattan, his brisk early-morning walks were accompanied by a contingent of reporters. His off-the-cuff remarks on these “constitutionals” only added to his image as a down-to-earth leader.

Last May, Mrs. Daniel put her Manhattan apartment on the market for $8 million. She had bought the home, at 830 Park Avenue near East 76th Street, with proceeds from her first book.

Clifton Daniel died at 87 in 2000. In addition to her son Clifton, Mrs. Daniel is survived by two other sons, Harrison Gates Daniel and Thomas Gates Daniel, and five grandchildren. Her son William Wallace Daniel died in 2000 from injuries he suffered when a taxicab struck him on Park Avenue near his mother’s home.

Though her singing career ended long ago, Mrs. Daniel was never far from the public eye. For several years in the 1950s she conducted her own radio program, “Authors in the News.” She and Mike Wallace were co-hosts of a radio show called “Weekday.” In the mid-1960s, she introduced music and dance programs from around the world as the host of the “CBS International Hour.” She also acted in summer stock. And then there were her many books.

“It had been widely prophesied that when my father got out of the White House, my so-called career would fold and the public would lose interest in plain Margaret Truman,” she wrote in “Souvenir” in 1956. “Since I had done everything I could think of not to trade on my father’s position and to stand on my own feet from the beginning, I felt more optimistic than the gossipers.

“I do not believe that hard work goes astray, and I know that I had worked. I was willing to go on working.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Margaret Truman Daniel, President’s Daughter and Popular Author, Dies at 83. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe